This is great! I love to see people exploring mood tracking and looking for correlations and insights. I hope you write more about what this helps you discover.
<shameless plug> I built Moodprint (http://moodprint.com) to do the same sort of thing. It's using random sampling as well, though it's personal as opposed to team-based, and it allows free-form mood entry. Some people have been using it for >6 months, and it's helped find patterns around work and relationships, for instance.
Sorry -- we're still setting up, so things are a bit muddled. I've moved the welcome message onto the homepage and made the discussions public, so you should be able to get a better idea of what's going on now. Thanks for the feedback!
Good luck! I traveled that road for a few years with a site called MyPullList (2007-2010, RIP), and had a heck of a time with ... basically all of it. I did have a lot of fun talking about the data model and its challenges during the height of the NoSQL hype, though.
Gawande is one of my favorite non-fiction authors; I've learned a ton from his books and articles. I second (and would third and fourth if I could) the recommendation for The Checklist Manifesto here.
Mid-1990s at the very earliest, and arguably later: he still presumably had easily accessible, fast, internet access with wikipedia and google (just, not on his phone) and could still contact other people on their cellphones.
The solution is to use a bug tracker within the SCM:
http://bugseverywhere.org/ (my personal favorite, but there are 3/4 other options that you can look into).
Not only it does offer distributed bug tracking on the command line (without breaking your workflow), but it implicitly allows to isolate bugs to branches. You can fix a bug in a branch, and a subsequent merge of the changeset will automatically fix the current branch.
I don't understand why these projects are so underrated. In "early git times", distributed bug tracking on top of git was quite a hot subject. They solve many issues nicely.
Github might be a "nifty" viewer, and I do host projects on github for added visibility (by simply using a second push remote), but that's about it. I find "tig" and "bugseverywhere" to complement git nicely and work much better than any web browser could.
Had the flights been issue-free, I would have started out neutral. Had BigCo had someone watching out for me and fixing problems proactively, I would have started out with a hugely positive impression of the company. Either way, the in-person part would have done a good bit to reduce those feelings, as it was formulaic and role- rather than person-focused.
I should also mention that BigCo gave me one of the worst phone screens I've ever experienced (bad for the same lack of regard for me, personally), so I thought seriously about declining the in-person visit.
I ... suppose? I like to think that I've interviewed and been interviewed enough to know when the other side has any interest at all in having an actual conversation, though.
Some people are really smart, kick ass on the job, and would be an asset to any company they join -- but they happen to be terrible interviewees. Maybe they're shy. Maybe they've had a rough flight out to BigCo the previous day. Maybe they've got bitchy resting face. Etc. Traditional interviews are unfair to these people.
But it goes the other way, too. Some really smart, hard working, great hiring managers are really bad at interviewing people. Maybe they're distracted by work. Maybe they don't have a lot of time to be doing interviews, and a giant stack of candidates to go through. Maybe they dislike the script they're being asked to follow as much as the person they're interviewing dislikes it. Etc. Traditional interviews are unfair to these people, too.
This is why turning the interview into a conversation, to whatever extent possible, is an imperative. As the interviewee, you have to jump through the necessary hoops to establish your qualifications. You have to check the boxes the HRbots demand. But once you've done that, you should steer the dialogue off-script (in a friendly and polite way, of course).
Once you and your interviewer are ad libbing, shooting the shit, being honest with each other, you do each other a favor. You're allowing one another to get a real sense for the role and the fit. In that phase of the conversation, someone on the other side with "[no] interest in having an actual conversation" will very quickly reveal as much. But just maybe, he or she will surprise you.
Sorry you didn't enjoy it! In all honesty, the travel is what stuck with me more than anything else about that entire process, though, and it's what started solidifying my thoughts about all of this. Hiring has a user experience like everything else, and in a lot of cases travel will take up more time than you ever spend talking to someone.
<shameless plug> I built Moodprint (http://moodprint.com) to do the same sort of thing. It's using random sampling as well, though it's personal as opposed to team-based, and it allows free-form mood entry. Some people have been using it for >6 months, and it's helped find patterns around work and relationships, for instance.